When
Jesse James Gang
TJ Stiles was growing up in Minnesota, his father showed him an old photo of the body of Bill Stiles, who was killed during the James-Younger Gang’s 1876 raid on Northfield. The outlaw was no relation to the youngster, but the photo whetted his appetite to know more about Jesse James and his compatriots. Stiles later attended college in Northfield, which only served to increase his interest in the gang.
Ultimately, that interest resulted in Jesse James, the Last Rebel of the Civil War, published by Knopf. Several other books on the James Gang have come out in the last couple of years. Mark Boardman asked Stiles what makes his effort different from the others.
STILES: Most of them have been fairly narrowly focused on the events of their lives in trying to find out more facts and more details. Of course I wanted to do that also, I wanted to present an accurate picture of what they did. However, the purpose of my book was really to understand them. Obviously Jesse James is my special focus, and I wanted to explain Jesse James–why he became so famous, why he stands head and shoulders above so many other American criminals from that time, why he is so well known, and to show that he was, in fact, much more than a criminal. So the purpose of my book is, while I do my best to accurately reconstruct events, and to look at his life and get the details right, the larger purpose is to look at him in the context of his times and really explain him.
BOARDMAN: In fact, much of what your book is about is laying the case that Jesse James, as you said, was much more than just an outlaw, but in fact was a terrorist. Now that’s kind of a loaded term nowadays. Maybe you could tell us just exactly what you mean by that.
STILES: Well, a couple of warnings right off the bat. One is that, as I put in an end note to my prologue, I wrote the book before September 11, and it is in absolutely no way an attempt to connect Jesse James with the events that we have so recently witnessed. I’m not saying that he is like a modern day terrorist or like Osama Bin Laden. Some of the reviews I’ve gotten, though, have been very positive and have actually gone overboard in saying that I call him a 19th century Osama Bin Laden. But no, I mean he was definitely a criminal. But I say he was a forerunner of the modern terrorist, because he used violence and the notoriety and attention he got from his violence to help promote a political cause which fits into most accepted definitions of terrorism. He did not function like say Osama Bin Laden or the Red Brigades or something attacking symbolic targets, trying to inflict pain for its own sake in many cases. He was definitely trying to make some easy money; he was definitely a violent man who enjoyed robbing, enjoyed the excitement of the life he led. But what set him apart from so many other criminals of his time is that he used the fame, he used the notoriety he got from that to promote the cause of former Confederates.
BOARDMAN: Now I think we ought to be clear, he didn’t represent all of the former Confederates, but one particular aspect of that large group, right?
STILES: That’s right. My book comes as a surprise to people who have read a lot about Jesse James and the James-Younger Gang because I spent a great deal of time looking at his historical context. Out of basically 400 pages of narrative text, the first 100 pages Jesse James himself is not an actor in this book. He hasn’t been born yet, or he is a child. But what I do is look at how to really understand this larger role he played. I take a fresh look at what happened in Missouri, what his family was going through, what their society was like, and how the politics got to the point so that when the Civil War broke out people ended up turning against their own neighbors. After the war, Missouri was divided into three political groups basically; you had the former Confederates, you had conservative Unionists who became the Unionist wing of the Democratic Party, and you had Radical Unionists who became the Republican Party after the war. And even within the Confederates group, there were a lot of Confederates who did not condone Jesse James’ behavior or his attempts to depict himself as a hero to all Confederates. Once the former Confederates got the vote back in Clay County, Jesse James’ home county, each of the sheriffs who chased after him, once the Confederates were able to vote in the elections, were former Confederates. So it’s important to note that he wasn’t a hero to all Confederates. However when you look at who his supporters were, all of his supporters were Confederates, that was the base of his support.
BOARDMAN: We should mention that in terms of his grooming, if you will, for this position, he entered into the fight of the Civil War itself somewhat late in the battle, but he was still young and he rode with some of the toughest Confederate guerrillas around.
STILES: Yes, that’s right. And it’s interesting to note that the people he rode with were just self-organized groups of Confederates. Except for during General Price’s raid in 1864, and except during their winters when many of them would go to Texas, they did not respond to the Confederate chain of command. They would organize themselves, they followed the men who had the greatest leadership potential among them, and they were completely spontaneously organized groups. On the other hand, they saw themselves as Confederates and they gave themselves Confederate ranks, and they believed in the larger Confederate cause. But what that meant in Missouri is that it came down to a battle against their neighbors. The Union forces were local men who organized into militia forces, and the Confederate forces were local men who organized themselves into Confederate guerrilla organizations. So the war was incredibly vicious. Fletch Taylor, who was the first guerrilla commander Jesse rode with, declared his purpose in a letter to the Liberty Tribune in 1864, saying that he was going to stay in Clay County until the radicals all left that county. Now that’s a flatly political statement of his aims; he aimed to drive out the radical unionist civilians of Clay County. It’s really remarkable; you don’t see that sort of thing elsewhere in the Civil War. You didn’t see Lee invading Pennsylvania and saying I’m going to stay here until all the Republicans leave. But in Missouri, since people were fighting their neighbors, it was a war to remake the state politically at the grassroots.
BOARDMAN: One element of that was inflicting terror on one side or another. In fact I think you mentioned in the book how some of the men that Jesse rode with, maybe even Jesse himself, took scalps of their enemies.
STILES: I try to make clear that warfare was terribly savage on both sides. The Union forces would just shoot men on suspicion without trial, and they raided homes and treated civilians shabbily at best. Of course many of those civilians were their own neighbors. Jesse James himself famously was beaten by a militia when they raided his farmhouse in 1863, and his stepfather was hung, as is well known. However, the Confederate guerrillas seemed to have gone farther than anyone else. Fletch Taylor’s group, and especially bloody Bill Anderson’s group which Jesse rode with–and wrote about proudly of himself as being one of Anderson’s best men–they dismembered enemy dead, they took scalps, they tied the scalps to their saddles and to their bridles and they took great pride in the horror and terror they inflicted on the Unionists.
BOARDMAN: Certainly much more savage than anything I think this country’s ever seen otherwise.
STILES: Well, not necessarily. One thing that I note in the book is that the United States, if you go back to the Colonial period, it’s seen some really horrific atrocities. If you look at the year that Jesse James was riding with the Confederate guerrillas, 1864, you have a number of events very close in time to his guerrilla career. You have the Sand Creek massacre in which southern Cheyenne women and children were killed and their bodies were mutilated by Colorado cavalrymen. You have the Sioux uprising in Minnesota in which both the Dakota warriors and also the US troops who responded against them committed horrible atrocities, killing noncombatants. During Reconstruction you have all kinds of atrocities committed against the freed slaves. There’s also the New York City Draft Riots in which white crowds attacked black civilians in New York City in 1863. But all of these atrocities are racial incidents. What is surprising in Missouri is that these atrocities are between people who are not only of the same race but of basically the same religion, basically the same ethnic background. You have slaveholders on both sides, you have people of the same birthplace who lived in the same communities, and yet you have these atrocities taking place between people who are as closely identified as you can get. And it really shows how savage the war had gotten. It’s very easy for historians to say, writers to say, “Well they just became savage fiends.” But I think that the sociological and psychological element of them becoming such hardened killers–and such brutal killers–comes out of the fact that this was a very deeply felt war, and that people started fighting because they really believed in something. They’d become so polarized that they couldn’t tolerate people who had the opposite view. It was a very ideological war, a very political war.
BOARDMAN: And for some, especially on the Confederate side, the war didn’t end at Appomattox; in fact, that was sort of a new beginning for a different kind of warfare. I think you pointed that out in the book in particular with Jesse and Frank and some of their cohorts.
STILES: That’s right. And that’s where we can start to draw the distinction between Jesse James from people such as Billy the Kid. Missouri was a Western state, it was not a frontier state. It hadn’t been for years before his birth. You look at Billy the Kid, you look at the Lincoln County War, and you have this sparsely settled territory with political wire-pullers and you have the sort of conditions that are authentic frontier conditions. And that created Billy the Kid and other gunmen like him. Look at Jesse James’ life and you see that the context that he really belongs to is not the frontier but it’s this vast context of violence across the South. In much of the South the Civil War ended, but the struggle continued–but it was a struggle over what sort of society the South would have after Emancipation, what sort of political structure would exist, and you had a lot of violence directed against Unionists, against freed slaves. You had a lot of tremendous political violence that gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan and other groups. Missouri was a border state, so the violence after the Civil War was through its own peculiar version of it, just like the Civil War itself, was its own peculiar version of the Civil War. You had a state unlike, say, Mississippi where you had a state with less than 10% of the population that was black and the two-thirds to three-quarters of the white population were Unionists. So instead of it being this simply drawn racial struggle, you have a political battle–and people like Jesse James, these Confederate guerrillas that started their careers of outlawry after the war in a very political context. The first daylight peacetime armed bank robbery in American history was of the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty in 1866. I looked at who the officers and owners of the bank were, and I compared them with men who had been appointed by the radical governor under the Ouster Ordinance, which required the governor to appoint new officials at every level of government. They were the local leading radical Republicans, the men who were the county officials in Clay County, men who were the organizers of the Republican Party, as the Radical Party became. Those are the men who owned the Clay County Savings Association, and the robbery took place less than two weeks after the first Republican rally in Clay County’s history, there in the town of Liberty, led by these same men. And that robbery began a year of violence in which people were writing to the military and writing to federal officials saying, “We’re on the verge of a second Civil War here.” Former Confederate guerrillas were directly confronting the state officials, directly confronting the voter registration officials, they were attacking local Radical Republicans–and being attacked in turn. That’s the context that explains how banditry rose in Missouri, this non-frontier state.
BOARDMAN: So it’s not, I guess what the legend tells us about folks like Jesse James, that he was striking out in maybe a class warfare against the people with wealth and power and control, but in fact it was more of an attack on political targets, whether they be institutions or the people themselves.
STILES: That’s right. And throughout his career he engaged in a lot of banditry for it’s own sake. But when you look at Jesse and Frank James, and when you look at the Youngers, who were they? They were men who were raised in slave-owning families. They were the wealthiest portion of their community. They were not poor dirt farmers who resented these rich and powerful outsiders. They were the insiders. They were from the families that had been the most prosperous, the most commercial farmers in their communities. Somebody who wants to just read about the robberies may be a little confused by this, but I spent a great deal of time explaining Jesse James’ family and the fact that they were commercial hemp and tobacco farmers, that they were very wealthy, that they had a larger than average number of slaves for their county. That explains how they fit into society because it shows that Jesse James was not striking back against his foes out of some kind of resentment over economics. It’s just not true. He, if anything, he was from a family that had always been a part of the ruling group, the most prominent, most respected group in his community, and so what they were doing is they were engaging in banditry, sometimes attacking their foes directly, sometimes simply refusing to give up their arms, refusing to follow the rules. But 1866 was this very political year. There’s been very little evidence that Jesse James and Frank James took direct part in any robberies before 1868 with the Russellville Raid in Kentucky. However, I found reason to believe that they probably were active before 1868. The end of 1866, however, the group they were with occupied the town of Lexington on election day, which led to this confrontation with the state militia, and it also led to the death of Archie Clement, who had been the leader of the survivors of Bloody Bill Anderson’s group. And that then also followed the well-organized counterattack organized by Thomas Fletcher, the radical governor of Missouri. The gang started to fall apart, and their political roles started to fall apart also, and it became more just general banditry. It is only when Jesse James himself emerges as the leading bandit that the gang starts to take on a political role again, and his alliance with John Newman Edwards gives him a forum to write about politics and to attack his enemies in print.
BOARDMAN: And that brings up perhaps the two most towering figures that seem to influence not only Jesse the person, but Jesse the legend and myth. One of those is the former Confederate officer that you mentioned, John Newman Edwards, who became a journalist, and the other was his mother.
STILES: Yes, that’s right.
BOARDMAN: Can you tell us a little about each of them?
STILES: Well, Jesse’s mother is really, with the exception of Frank, is really kind of the main figure, apart from Jesse James, in my book. Her personality just stunned everybody who met her. She was so outspoken, so domineering. She was physically large. She was described as 6 feet tall by many observers. So no matter what her actual height was, she was an intimidating figure. And at a time when femininity was highly valued, when the vision of women being very meek and demure was what was prized in American society, she was completely unlike that. She had a ferocious tongue. She was described by the Union provost marshal during the Civil War in a report on the secessionists of Clay County as one of the worst women in this state. And George Caleb Bingham, the Adjutant General of the state, describes her as a woman of masculine will and intelligence. So she really influenced and intimidated a lot of people. But she wasn’t just simply a “harpy” who was lashing out at everyone. She was very firm in her political beliefs. She was determinedly a Southerner and a Confederate from the very beginning of the Civil War. I found a newspaper report, an interview with her in 1876 during the climatic election that led to the downfall of reconstruction, and the reporter asked her about her opinions on politics. Of course women couldn’t vote at the time, and she went through and she gave very distinct opinions about the candidates at each level of office, about Philden who was running for the presidency on the Democratic ticket, on the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor. This was a woman who really thought about politics, and had very firm, fierce Confederate opinions. So she was obviously a very strong influence on Jesse, who was very political himself. And she also supported her boys continually. During the Civil War, the same Union provost marshal said that he had heard her declare that she was proud of her boys during their worst guerrilla atrocities, and that she prayed to God that He would protect them in their work. Later on she would repeatedly approach reporters and newspapers editors and give interviews in which she would declare how proud she was of her boys, and then also gave fraudulent alibis to explain that they couldn’t possibly be guilty of what they were accused of. So she was a ferocious figure, and it’s very interesting that Jesse James, when he finally married, married a women who was his first cousin and named after his own mother. That, of course, could be just coincidental. But it’s a rather curious fact, which whether it was intentional or not, seems to reflect how important his mother was in his life.
BOARDMAN: The other person that we mentioned was John Newman Edwards, who at the end of the Civil War didn’t give up immediately, but when he did come back to Missouri, he became an influential journalist and supporter of Jesse and Frank.
STILES: That’s right. And as I note in the book, often the way that people write about John Newman Edwards, they describe him as the man who created Jesse James’ mythical image through his newspapers. He started off as a new paper editor specifically by founding the Kansas City Times. Later he became an editor of the St. Louis Dispatch, ancestor of the Post Dispatch, and of the St. Louis Times later on. Now I note, however, that the relationship between Jesse and Edwards appears to have been partnership, not puppetry, that Jesse James wasn’t simply a guy who was out there doing his stuff and that Edwards wrote about him and created his public image. There are Jesse’s letters to the press, which initially appeared only in Edwards’ newspapers. But later on Jesse started writing letters which, you never know with 100% certainty that they are his, but that they’re very likely to be his, to newspapers to Nashville. He would later write letters saying things about people who were personal friends of Edwards showing that Jesse himself was, as his brother-in-law declared after his death, was a compulsive letter writer, and somebody who constantly wanted attention, and at the same time someone who was very political. So Jesse wasn’t just his puppet. On the other hand, Jesse James, his political strategy, his publicity strategy was really created, it appears, by John Newman Edwards. Here’s a man who came back from exile in Mexico where he went rather than surrendering after the Union victory, and saw a state where Confederates were barred from politics, a state where the vast majority of people were Unionists–and he set about trying to create a Confederate identity for the state. Even before Confederates could vote, he used the newspaper to talk about the righteousness of the cause, to glorifying Missouri’s Southerness. He would talk about how Missourians, real Missourians in their heart of hearts, were Confederates. And it’s interesting, one of those coincidences in history, that Jesse James appears to have befriended John Newman Edwards at the very moment when Confederates were allowed to vote again. And all of a sudden there was a political role for Jesse to play in mobilizing the Confederate vote. So there followed this remarkable series of coordinated letters from Jesse with editorials by Edwards, that catapulted Jesse James, in particular, out of all the outlaws. into the center of Missouri politics. And without Jesse, John Newman Edwards probably would not have become the leading newspaper editor he was in Missouri. And without Edwards, Jesse James would not have become this very specifically political hero to former Confederates. It was a really remarkable partnership that developed.
BOARDMAN: Sort of a symbiotic relationship, I guess.
STILES: Yeah, very much so.
BOARDMAN: Well as the 1870′s went by and we got to the middle part of that decade, you say in the book that Jesse and John Newman Edwards basically accomplished what they set out to do. How do you mean that?
STILES: Well, you know, one thing I note is that Jesse was far from the sole cause of this, what happened in Missouri. But his success was in part due to, when you look at the strategy, we start off by looking at their strategy. I use the psychological term “cognitive dissonance,” when you believe in two contradictory things at the same time. Edwards and Jesse James promoted this image of Jesse as a martyr to the radical Republicans who had ruled Missouri after the Civil War, and who they claimed wouldn’t leave him alone, persecuted him and tried to hunt him down and kill him or capture him, and that he was innocent of all of these crimes he was accused of. So they saw him as this martyr to radical vindictiveness. At the same time, Edwards put the discussion of Jesse in the context of praising whoever it was who carried out these robberies and talking about how former bushwhackers were the bravest men and they refused to give up their self-respect or their guns, and that they defied society and they defied this corrupt radical regime that had been put in power by the Union victory. And so the people who supported Jesse, who were mostly former Confederates, simultaneously believed that he was innocent and a victim and a martyr, and they also believed that he was guilty and they were proud of him for it. Sort of a strange dual belief that they had about him. And it also fed into this image held by the conservative Unionists, the Unionist Democrats. They also resented what was going on in the country. They believed in the Union, but they had wanted to keep the old slave-owning society. They did not believe in the goals of the radical Republicans who wanted to bring freed slaves into some kind of equality. The radicals weren’t modern day egalitarians, although they wanted to give freedmen the vote, they wanted to bring them into society in some way and remove the restrictions on them. Tthe Unionist Democrats didn’t want that. They wanted the Union as it was. And so this image that they created of Jesse James reflected their own discontent with the radical Republicans–in Congress especially. What happened was that when the Pinkertons got involved and they invaded western Missouri, as the Confederates saw it, and especially when they launched a raid on the Samuel home, Jesse James’ mother’s home, that led to the death of his half-brother and his mother’s arm being amputated, it sort of vindicated all these things that Jesse James had been saying about himself and that John Edwards had been saying about him, that these Yankees were invading Missouri, and that fit into this larger reaction against Reconstruction, against the attempt to impose civil rights on unwilling Confederates in the South. Once the South was defeated, the enemy stopped being so much former Confederates as it became sort of Radical Republican vision of society. And Jesse James’ own story and his propaganda fit into that, so it was kind of a combination of forces that helped make Missouri a more Confederate state than it had been during the Civil War itself.
BOARDMAN: And by 1876 the Radical Rrepublicans were basically out and the Democrats were back in.
STILES: That’s right. In 1876 there was this climactic election. It’s almost impossible for us to imagine now what the atmosphere was like. This is a society with, no movies, no television. Politics was not only something people believed in, it was their social lives. People went to political rallies and they spent all day listening to four-hour speeches, and that was fun. So people were very political. And you had this great revolution: four million people had gone from slavery to freedom, and there was this racial conflict and this political conflict, and the whole shape of what America was going to be like was, it was literally a revolution. And 1876 was the final election, kind of a final referendum on what was going to happen in the South, and whether Congress would be able to force the white South to accept the black South as political equals, or whether they would let the white South do what it wanted to in the South. And this affected people all across the country. The former Confederates really rose to primacy in Missouri. Jesse James himself had moved to Nashville, and he was thinking of himself as a Southerner. He had been writing letters to the newspapers in Nashville saying that he had fought for the South, to defend it from Northern tyranny.. He was really thinking of himself in more than just a Missouri context. And so 1876 was a climactic year. People were going to rallies, and there were these vicious political speeches going on. One speaker for the Republicans was pointing out that every man who shot at a Union soldier was a Democrat. It was that kind of bitterness. And that was the year the gang went to Northfield. Now I think they went to Northfield to make money. They wanted to carry out a robbery and get some cash. But they specifically selected Northfield because one of the leading Radical Republicans from the South, a man who had just been kicked out of Mississippi where he had been the Reconstruction governor, Adelbert Ames, had moved to Northfield just a couple of months before. He hadn’t been there for very long, and he wasn’t famous locally. But that’s where the bandits went in the midst of this very political atmosphere, to rob one of the most determined spokesmen for black civil rights and for Reconstruction of the South. They thought if they were going to rob somebody, that’s who they would rob. And I found a statement which most writers, I can’t claim all because I’m not sure that it’s all, most writers have overlooked. In the Minneapolis Tribune, immediately after the capture of the Youngers, Bob Younger said, “We went to Northfield because we heard that ex-governor Ames of Mississippi had money there and one of the boys had a spite against him. And so that’s the bank we picked to rob”. Cole Younger in 1897, in his first written account of the robbery, denied that they had tried to rob a bank in Mankato and had been frightened away. He said that they talked about banks all over the place, but they had decided ahead of time to rob Northfield because of Ames and also his father-in-law–he was connected, of course, to Benjamin Butler, who was a former Union general and a leading Radical Republican in Congress. But interestingly, it was Ames only who was mentioned by Bob Younger in 1876.
BOARDMAN: It’s interesting then that 1876 is a watershed year for Jesse James because from a political standpoint, it’s probably the most successful year of his life. But from the standpoint of his gang, which gets shot to pieces in Northfield with only Frank and Jesse getting away relatively unscathed, it’s one of his greatest defeats.
STILES: That’s correct. And it’s one of those things that gives the story, and I can’t claim credit for it, but it gives my book such narrative force, a dramatic force. For example in 1870, when Jesse James’ name became well known in Missouri because of the Gallitan Robbery and the murder of John W. Sheets, it’s a coincidence that former Confederates are allowed to vote that year. But it serves Jesse’s purpose, and he takes on this political role. 1876 is this great climactic year in American history. It’s almost as important as 1865, with Appomattox and the defeat of the South. And it’s also the climax of his career, the James-Younger Gang’s career when they’re defeated at Northfield. It’s one of those remarkable coincidences that gives the story this dramatic force. But it also helps explain why, when Jesse came back three years later and started the second gang, why it was such a short-lived career, why he couldn’t keep it together and keep it going. Tthere was no longer a political role for him to play afterward. Some readers don’t really care about the politics and may wonder why it matters. I think it’s very important because if you want to understand Jesse, you have to understand the politics that he thought about and wrote about and tried to play a part in. But it also explains why the state of Missouri was able to finally bring him down after less than three years of the second act in his bandit career. He didn’t have a public role to play anymore. The politics that he had written about and that shaped the public image of him were over; former Confederates had won. The Democrats had triumphed in Missouri and they had sent two former Confederates to the US Senate. The state constitution had been rewritten by former Confederates. The situation had completely changed and Jesse outlived his usefulness.
BOARDMAN: We can add in the fact that after Northfield, when he lost so many compatriots that he had known for years dating back to the Civil War, after that it seemed like he was forced to take in people who had not had that really tough, vicious, violent background. He had to bring in novices and train them in the way of doing things, and that wasn’t really successful.
STILES: Yes, I think that’s right. And it’s interesting that the Governor Crittenden of Missouri noted, I think it was in his memoirs, that he wanted to offer a large reward for the outlaws because since money was their object in the first place, an even larger offer of money would divide them against each other. Well, that wouldn’t have been true, that wouldn’t have worked during the main period of Jesse James’ and the James-Younger Gang’s existence. Here were these guys who were held together by this loyalty that had been forged during the Civil War, by their sense of being Confederates pitted against the Radical Unionists. The second group was just young men who were sort of attracted to the gangster glamour that Jesse had, who were just attracted by the money and the excitement. And what happened? They started to disintegrate. They started to turn against each other. Jesse himself seemed to have felt this. He became increasingly paranoid. He wanted to kill Jim Cummins. He actually did end up killing one of his gang members, Ed Miller, the brother of Clell Miller. The gang turned against each other and the whole thing fell apart. And again I think it’s because with this greater distance from the Civil War, with no sense of their having a cause, the fact that they were young men who didn’t have that bond of loyalty that the former Confederate guerrillas had, there was nothing keeping them together except money. So it’s not surprising that the gang fell apart as it did.
BOARDMAN: And when big money was offered for the head of Jesse James, a couple of the relatively new recruits, Bob and Charlie Ford, who didn’t have that longstanding traditional respect and comradeship with the gang, thought, “Well, this is the easier way to get some money.”
STILES: Yeah, exactly. Frank James later said that he never really trusted Bob Ford, that Jesse never really trusted Bob Ford–and for good reason because Bob claimed that from the very beginning he planned to bring Jesse down for the reward.
BOARDMAN: And they earned that on April 3, 1882 when Jesse was standing up on a stool and was dusting off the top of a picture, and Bob shot him behind the ear.
STILES: That’s correct. And one of the little minor controversies is, what was Jesse doing with his guns off? The Ford brothers gave a lot of interviews that day and the next day. In one of the accounts they said that it was an unusually hot day for April, and that Jesse and Charlie had gone out to curry the horses that morning. Jesse had commented that it was hot and took off his coat, and said, “Well, when I go back outside again, somebody might see my pistols on me, I might get some attention.” So he unbuckled his belt and took his revolvers off. And that’s what they had been waiting for. I think it was Bob Ford who said that they wouldn’t take a chance on Jesse James as long as he had his weapons on him. And the moment he had them off, that’s when they shot him.
BOARDMAN: And that’s when the legend of Jesse James really started going forward. The story was covered in newspapers across the world, as a matter of fact.
STILES: That’s right.
BOARDMAN: And John Newman Edwards, who was fading in terms of his influence, wrote some articles in a last attempt to build up Jesse as being the poor martyr who had died for his cause and had died for his people.
STILES: That’s right. Now he really had a remarkable career. It’s just astonishing that he was alive and free and carrying out these high-profile robberies as long as he did. And so naturally that attracts our attention now. When I wrote my book, I reconstructed the events. I paid a lot of attention to the famous robberies. I give the version that I think makes the most sense and then I explain my reasoning in my end notes and sources. I realize that people can disagree with me on specific events because I’m doing my best to reconstruct them. I’m not going to make the reader fight his way through all of the evidence in the narrative. I paid due attention to the exciting events that get our attention. But as much as his life is so dramatic and exciting, why is it that Jesse James out of all of the James-Younger Gang who stands out? Why is it Jesse James of all the criminals of that time who stands out? The reason is that Jesse James, of all the outlaws, was the one who demanded this this political role, who sought out attention. He was a continual self-promoter. And he continually wrote about politics and his own martyrdom, and he made this alliance with John Newman Edwards. Edwards wrote about all the outlaws, but he far and away gave primacy to Jesse James. So when it comes to the actual robberies, Jesse was clearing a leading figure, but I never say that he was THE leader. However, when it comes to everything that made him famous and made the James-Younger Gang famous, Jesse is clearly the one who stands out. He is the one who wanted attention, who talked about politics. He’s the one who drew the public eye, and that’s why my book is about Jesse specifically. However, at the end of his life he did become just a criminal. Jesse James outlived the things that made him a public figure in the first place. So by the time he was brought down, he had paved the way for his own non-political mythical status with his second bandit career. There’s no politics surrounding the second act in his bandit life. He was just a bandit. That’s all there was to it. And that colors the way we remember him now. We remember Jesse James as the guy who was shot by the coward Robert Ford. We don’t remember him as the man who attacked Radical Republicans in his letters to the press, who talked about how he was a man who fought for the South and defended it from Northern tyranny. Jesse James himself inadvertently is responsible for the way we remember him in the sort of mythic non-political way. But he’s responsible because he just couldn’t take it anymore, he just couldn’t live peacefully, he had to return to a bandit life. His personality in the end won out, and propelled him sort of inexorably toward his doom.
BOARDMAN: Outside of your book and perhaps a handful of others, a lot of what has been handed down either in print, on the screen big and small, for the last 120 years, has been basically Jesse, the social bandit, who again was trying to fight the powers of corruption and big money, and who ostensibly gave some of the proceeds to the poor, his helpless friends and neighbors. To that extent, did Jesse and John Newman Edwards succeed in creating an image that was not factual but did fit their plans?
STILES: Well, yes I think so. Jesse and John Newman Edwards were clearly aware of the fact that there was indeed agrarian resentment of the railroads, and that there was this sort of farmers’ movement, the Grangers in particular, who were starting to arrive during the 1870′s. In the mid-1870′s the Grangers just took off in Missouri and other states in that region. During a couple of their robberies, especially the first train robbery in Iowa in 1873, the bandits actually declared to the passengers that they were Grangers. So they used that, but they tried to turn even that toward politics. But there’s two sides of this. One is trying to play a role in the politics, trying to influence people in how they think of themselves, thought of themselves as Southerners, how they thought about the political situation. But one of the methods they used was to promote Jesse, himself, as this heroic, charming, beleaguered fellow–and Jesse was very good at playing to a crowd. He was very good during his train robberies especially, whenever he had a literally captive audience. He would declaim to them, he would speak to them, he would make jokes and make little acts of kindness. He was a very charming fellow and he used that very effectively. That side of it has survived. One of the things I do in my book, which I haven’t seen done elsewhere, is I’ve methodically examined, for example, the train robberies and who they were robbing. A lot of historians have called Jesse James a social bandit because, well we know that railroads were unpopular and he was robbing railroads. One of the things I do in my book is I methodically exam who he was really robbing. The railroad corporations didn’t lose any money in train robberies. The bandits specifically robbed express companies, completely separate institutions that contracted with railroad companies to ship their cash in the baggage cars on trains. The railroads would post a ritual reward, but they really took very little interest in catching Jesse James. The express companies were the ones who were very agitated about the bandits, and they’re the ones who initially funded the Pinkerton hunt for Jesse. One of the things I did was go through the industry journals, “The Railway Age” and “The Railway Gazette” and found that the railroad industry magazines and publications paid no attention to train robberies. Then I looked at the express company magazines and journals, “Our Expressman” and “The Expressman’s Monthly,” and whenever there was a train robbery virtually the entire issue would be devoted to it. There would be accounts by the expressmen who were robbed, there were would be tips for how messengers should handle a robbery, exhortations to express messengers to resist. So the express companies were the ones who were being robbed–and the farmers didn’t care about express companies. You didn’t ship goods by Federal Express and you didn’t ship grain by express company in 1874. So one of the things I do in my book is really sort out a lot of this mythology that’s infected even historical writing by university professors. They just haven’t figured this out before. Once you look at Jesse’s train robberies, you see that it wasn’t an agrarian protest. He wasn’t standing up for the farmer. These were just high profile robberies that made Jesse James famous, and made people pay attention to him.
BOARDMAN: Did you first get interested in Jesse when you were growing up in Minnesota?
STILES: Yeah. I was always aware of Jesse James when I was growing up there. I grew up north of Minneapolis, about 90 miles in Benton County. My father had an old postcard–he still has it–showing Bill Chadwell, usually identified as William Stiles, the photo of him dead with a bullet hole in his chest. My father would always say that he was a relative, even though there’s no evidence that he’s related at all. I later went to Carlton College in Northfield, and by that time they had the reenactment every year. But I really began to become much more aware of him and his larger role as I started to work on a series of anthologies on American history. I had a chapter in my Civil War anthology with excerpts from John McCorkel’s memoirs on the Missouri Bushwhackers, and I had started to research the James’ story. When I finished my anthology series, I wanted to get at this story of the Civil War and Reconstruction. I realized that Jesse James had really been underestimated by various historians, that he was seen as sort of a trivial figure because he’s in the movies and he’s seen more as a mythical figure than as a real figure in history. I began to suspect that he’d been a much more political fellow and much more significant fellow than people realized. At the same time it was a great way of looking at everything that America went through during that period. Here was the greatest conflict in American history, and the greatest political issues in American history, and it comes down to the lives of individuals. In Missouri people had to choose what side they stood on. It wasn’t a matter of being from the North or being from the South. It wasn’t a matter of which state you were born in or where you lived. It was a border state where people had to make a conscious choice. Afterwards, there was no outside force imposing Reconstruction in Missouri. Everything that happened there was homegrown. People again had to make personal choices about the great issues of the day. So the life of Jesse James is a fantastic dramatic story, and I wanted to be able to do a better job of telling that story than anyone had done before. At the same time, I was fascinated by the way that everything that his life was about was all the larger issues in American history, all the things that go to the heart of what America is about, coming down to the lives of individual people. The Civil War not as a battle of armies, but of individual neighbors standing against each other, the issues that ensued out of the Civil War coming down to individuals taking sides against each other and having to make choices about what they believed in. And so the two fit together really well. I was able to write a book of history that has this larger context. It’s a story of this man and his family and what they went through. It’s even a bigger story than the Jesse James buffs and the people who love that story to begin with even realized.
BOARDMAN: So are you thinking about taking that same approach looking at an individual and how they fit within a context of that nature in any future enterprises?
STILES: Yeah, right now I’m working on a book that, it’s another biography, and it kind of looks at the same period from the other end of the spectrum. Rather than doing another outlaw book or criminal book, I’m looking at Cornelius Vanderbilt, the great, the first great railroad baron and before that, he was the great steamship tycoon. And again looking at the same period, you know, he lived his life much longer than Jesse James, but you know, looking at what America went through during this period and at the same time taking a very dramatic life that’s been underwritten about. There hasn’t been a lot of work by historians on Cornelius Vanderbilt, interestingly. And again somebody who ignored the law when it suited him, another powerful, strong figure who sort of made up his own rules as he went along, and sort of forced the rest of the country to respond to him. I’m going to the complete opposite of the spectrum, the other end of the country, the other end of, you know, the whole economic system, obviously the other end of the railroads! The owner rather than the robber. And looking at, again, telling a good story and also getting at what America went through in the 19th century and how it changed through the life of one man.
TJ Stiles is the author of “Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War”. He spoke with Mark Boardman.
was incarcerated in the Knoxville, Tennessee, jail from December 15, 1901, until June 27, 1903. While this period of his life is well chronicled by contemporary newspaper reports and court records, recently discovered letters written by Logan, his attorney John C. Houk, and his friend Jim Thornhill give a behind-the-scenes look at Logan’s incarceration and some of the events that followed.
